In Review:
Another View Of `Men Who Sailed Liberty Ships'
The Men Who Sailed the Liberty Ships, an hour-long
documentary, appeared on U.S. public television stations
in May. Available on video, it was written and directed by
Maria Brooks.

The review that appears here was written by Tom Leonard,
who sailed in the merchant marine from 1943 to 1952 and
was a member of the National Maritime Union. Leonard is a
longtime union activist and leader of the Socialist
Workers Party, which he joined in 1950.

The Men Who Sailed The Liberty Ships attempts to portray
the lives of the tens of thousands of merchant seamen who
sailed aboard the "liberty ships" during World War II. But
in the main the video really reflects the political
thinking of the narrators, who don't always accurately
convey the role of wartime seamen.

Their chronology of what happened to merchant seamen
during the war contains a lot of truths: the great number
of ships built and sunk; the disproportionately high
casualties suffered by seamen; the bombings; and the
torpedoing of ships in convoy.

The casualties among merchant seamen, of course,
represent a small fraction of the millions of workers
killed during the war in Europe and throughout Asia as a
result of the imperialist powers' grab for land and
resources - including Washington's atomic bombing of tens
of thousands of Japanese workers at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The documentary doesn't mention these.

I have a far different assessment of what the war meant
to seamen than that conveyed by the narrators.

Wartime service

Most of the narrators are former seamen, with the
exception of a wartime naval gunnery officer who was
assigned to merchant ships. His fake bravado about wartime
service is different than my experience with the navy
officers I sailed with.

The ones I knew were hostile and used their authority to
do everything possible to prevent fraternization between
navy gun crews and civilian crew members. For the most
part they were successful.

Liberty ships were 410-foot-long, 10,000-ton cargo
vessels constructed primarily for carrying war materials,
although some were also converted into troop carriers.
Nearly 3,000 such ships were built during the war, and
most of them were either sunk or scrapped within a few
years of the war's end.

What the video doesn't spend much time on is how
shoddily built these ships were, due to horrendous round-
the-clock speedup imposed on the labor movement to
"support the war effort." Some of the ships were built in
about 10 days; rushed welding encouraged by supervisors as
well as poor design resulted in many of them breaking up
and sinking in rough weather.

The seamen interviewed in the film were also members of
maritime unions, including the National Maritime Union
(NMU); Marine Firemen, Oilers, and Watertenders; and the
Master Mates and Pilots. There is also mention of the
Sailors Union of the Pacific.

At least two of the narrators were full-time union
officials during some of the war years. One of them, Joe
Stack, I recognized as the New York Port Agent for the NMU
at the time I was a member of that union.

Stack narrates a segment on the red-baiting attacks
against the union in 1943, and how the union responded
with a picket line around the old World Telegram offices.
I was at sea when that occurred, but I remember the
attacks received wide publicity - including overseas - and
created a lot of resentment among seamen against the witch-
hunters.

That attack was a forerunner of the postwar witch-hunt,
and was directed against the NMU and its Communist Party
leadership. It is correctly reported in the video as being
initiated by Walter Winchell, then one of the most widely
syndicated news columnists.

Winchell accused the NMU of being Communist-led, which
was true and publicly known at the time. But his added
charges that union leaders were sabotaging the U.S. war
effort had no foundation in the truth.

In connection with that smear, it's important to note
that charges of sabotaging the war effort were often used
to intimidate union militants during the war. The same
accusation, for example, was leveled against the United
Mine Workers when they struck in the early 1940s.

The Stalinists in general did not function as open
members of the Communist Party, for fear of putting off
the trade union officials and Democratic Party politicians
they worked so closely with. Many leaders of the union,
however, such as Stack, were well-known at the time as
members or supporters of the CP.

Behind the patriotic fervor

This brings me back to the difference I have with some
of the narrators, whose professions of patriotic loyalty
convey the impression that all seamen shared those views.

The tens of thousands of young seamen who were recruited
and trained to sail the liberty ships for example, had
just begun to be aware of how bad fascism was before the
war. They had very little understanding of this
historically new anti-working-class political movement.
Like most prewar workers they weren't too happy about
being drafted and many chose the alternative of joining
the merchant marine rather than military service.

In counterposition to the loyalty of the narrators, it's
far more accurate to observe that the overwhelming
majority of working people in the United States, including
seamen, became patriotic only after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor. And they remained patriotic, especially in the
early years of the war, in the mistaken belief they were
defending the country against the possibility of "foreign
invaders."

The trade union bureaucracy, the Communist Party, and
nearly every other current in the labor movement
collaborated with the U.S. government to paint World War
II as a "war for democracy," a fiction that remains common
currency today. Immediately after World War II, after
failing to keep the hot war going, the ruling classes of
the United States and Great Britain jointly opened the
cold war by equating the bloody crimes of fascism with
communism. It was partly on that basis that the witch-hunt
was able to register gains in the labor movement,
including the seamen's unions, as early as 1946.

Another truth portrayed in the video is that despite
services rendered to U.S. imperialism in World War II, the
Communist Party took major blows in the postwar witch-
hunt. As the film points out, in 1950 more than 2,000
seamen, many of them members of the Communist Party - but
also members of the Socialist Workers Party and other
union militants - lost their seamen's papers and right to
sail at the hands of the U.S. Coast Guard, acting in the
service of the employers and their government.

While important historical issues are raised, the theme
of the film constantly returns to one of betrayed loyalty.
The narrators succeed in projecting the message that while
they did their utmost to support U.S. imperialism in the
war, the government opened a witch-hunt against them. Now
they want the recognition they feel they are entitled to.

Despite this, the film includes footage and some factual
coverage about the life of seamen during the war that is
not generally accessible. This makes The Men Who Sailed
the Liberty Ships worth viewing. Young people in
particular will be struck by the ruthless disregard for
the lives of working people exhibited by the ruling
class - especially during imperialist war.